Announcing Our 2020 Roadmap

 Posted on December 13, 2019  |  James Turk

With full time developers working on the project for the first time in years, 2020 is going to be an ambitious year. Please note that many of these goals are outside of the core requirements of our grants, so this roadmap is aspirational. We are also only funded through the first half of the year, and seeking funding and partnerships to help make these a reality. If you’re interested in collaborating in any way, please get in touch. [Read More]

National Science Foundation Funding!

 Posted on November 18, 2019  |  James Turk

I’m excited to announce the most exciting development since we took the project over back in November 2016! The Open States team has received funding as part of an NSF grant and will, for the next ~9 months have full time staff. In a bit more detail, we have received funding as subgrantees on an NSF C-Accel Grant to build a prototype of something the team is calling the Federalism Data and Advanced Statistics Hub. [Read More]

Adding Full Text Search to Open States

 Posted on September 9, 2019  |  James Turk

For years, the most requested feature on Open States has been the ability to search all legislation by keyword, and to receive updates when new bills matching keywords are updated. We’re excited to announce that today marks the first step in that direction with the alpha release of an enhancement to our search API. If you’re using the GraphQL API simply add the searchQuery term to your bills() query. searchQuery in action [Read More]

Happy 10th Birthday, Open States!

 Posted on February 26, 2019  |  James Turk

It was 10 years ago today that the first post about what would become Open States was made on the Sunlight Labs blog. Read the post here: Our next big goal, The Fifty State Project *While no single developer has the time to volunteer writing a custom scraper for each state, the goal of having data…*sunlightfoundation.com Of course it was a few months later, at PyCon 2009 in Chicago that we really got things started: Fifty states Project: April 10th Status Report *Six weeks ago we announced on this blog _ the Fifty State Project _, our ambitious project to begin building scrapers…*sunlightfoundation. [Read More]

Introducing the new openstates.org

 Posted on January 9, 2019  |  James Turk

Just over a year ago, we gave a preview of some work that team member Olivia Cheng was working on. As of today, we’re proud to announce that work has become the new openstates.org. The new state overview page The new site has been something that Miles, Olivia, and myself have worked on in our spare time for the past year. We’re proud that it is now in a state that is ready to be shown off to the world in time for the start of the 2019 sessions. [Read More]

2019 Session Updates

 Posted on January 3, 2019  |  James Turk

Happy New Year! This is always the busiest time for the project, as nearly every state begins a new legislative session in the January of an odd-numbered year. Most states will be back in session by January 9th, and nearly all of them by January 16th. If you’re unsure when your state starts, there’s a great reference on Ballotpedia. The unfortunate fact is that many states don’t put their data up until the day the session starts, or sometimes later. [Read More]

More Ways to Get State Legislative Data

 Posted on November 5, 2018  |  James Turk

The Open States API has been putting legislative data in people’s hands since 2010. In that time we’ve served well over a billion API calls for thousands of users, and in doing so learned a lot about what data people use and how they use it. We’ve also learned quite a bit about how to model legislative data as we went from our initial subset of states to the 52 jurisdictions we cover today. [Read More]

New Directions

 Posted on October 1, 2018  |  James Turk

There’s been some radio silence here lately that has led to a few people asking about bigger picture questions, and we wanted to address some of these & make a few announcements regarding the direction of the project going forward. If you’re less interested in the “why” and more interested in the “what’s next” feel free to skip down to the relevant sections. To get the obvious question out of the way, we do not plan to shut Open States down. [Read More]

Open States progress report, March 2

 Posted on March 2, 2018  |  Miles Watkins

Hi again! Checking in with another progress update, as I begin my third and final month staffed full-time on Open States. We’ve continued to maintain high data quality, as the nation’s legislative sessions move ahead in full-swing; over the past month, we’ve had over 100 code commits to the scraper repository, closing 37 tickets. I’ve been able to take care of most of these bugfixes and manual data corrections, and have also been helping onboard many first-time contributors who are coming to the project via Google Summer of Code. [Read More]

Open States & Google Summer of Code 2018

 Posted on February 12, 2018  |  James Turk

We’re excited to announce that Open States has been accepted as a participating organization in Google Summer of Code 2018! Last year we had Hitesh Garg help us break ground on a brand new data admin tool. We’re excited to have the opportunity to work with a couple of new students this year and see what great improvements we can build together this summer. For those unfamiliar, GSoC is an opportunity for students to work on selected Open Source projects. [Read More]